Ebooks, Fiction, Non-Fiction 1000s of Free books
and stories online to read now ~ Main Page

Inside Japan by
W. E. Griffis

1873

A double pleasure rewards the pioneer who is the first to
penetrate into the midst of a new people. Besides the rare
exhilaration felt in treading soil virgin to alien feet, it acts like
mental oxygen to look upon and breathe in a unique civilization like
that of Japan. To feel that for ages millions of one's own race
have lived and loved, enjoyed and suffered and died, living the
fullness of life, yet without the religion, laws, customs, food,
dress and culture which seem to us to be the vitals of our social
existence, is like walking through a living Pompeii.

I confess to a chronic desire to explore the Island Empire in
which I dwell. Having already, in the central provinces of Japan,
trodden many a path never before touched by foreign foot, I yearned
to explore the twin provinces of Kadzusa and Awa, which form the
peninsula lying between the Gulf of Yeddo and the Pacific Ocean. A
timely holiday and a passport from the Japanese foreign office
enabled me to start toward the end of March, the time when all Japan
is glorious with blossoming plum trees, and the camellia trees in
forests of bloom are marshaled by thousands on the
mountain-slopes.

I was glad to get away from Yeddo: I had a fit of
anti-Caucasianism, and wished to dwell a while amidst things purely
Japanese. There were too many foreigners in Yeddo. In that city of
only eight hundred thousand Japanese there are now full two hundred
foreigners of all nationalities; and of these, fifty or more are
Americans. It was too much like home and too little like Japan.
Should I go to Yokohama, the case was worse. Nearly twelve hundred of
the sons of Japheth dwelt there, and to reach that upstart European
city one must travel on a railway and see telegraph-poles all along
the line. What was the use of living in Japan? Every young
Japanese, too, in the capital is brainful of
"civilization," "progress," "reform,"
etc. I half suspect a few cracks in the craniums belonging to some of
the youths who wish to introduce law, religion, steam, language,
frock-coats and tight boots by edict and ordinance. There was too
much civilization. I yearned for something more primitive, something
more purely Japanese; and tramping into the country I should find it.
I should eat Japanese food—profanely dubbed
"chow-chow;" sleep in Japanese beds—on the floor;
talk Japanese—as musical as Italian; and live so much like an
old-time native that I should feel as one born on the soil. By that
time, returning to Yeddo as a Japanese of the period, I should of
course burn to adopt railways, telegraphs and balloons, codify the
laws, improve upon United States postage, coinage and dress-coats,
and finish off by annexing the English language after I had cut out
all irregularities and made all the crooked spelling straight.

So, resolving to be a heathen for a week at least, I left Yeddo
one afternoon, though it took several hours to do so: the big city is
one of distances more magnificent than those of Washington. I started
in a jin-riki-sha, which baby-carriage on adult wheels has
already been described, so as to be tolerably familiar to all
American readers. The "team" of this "man-power
carriage" consists of two men, pulling tandem—one in the
shafts, the other running ahead with a rope over his shoulder, and,
until the recent passage of a law commanding decency, attired only in
his cuticle and a loin-cloth two inches wide. You take three coolies
when you wish to be stylish, while four are not an unknown sensation
in Yeddo. With these and fresh relays you can travel sixty, or even
eighty, miles a day; and I have known one man to run thirty miles on
the stretch.

Of all the modes of traveling in Japan, the jin-riki-sha is the
most pleasant. The kago is excruciating. It is a flat basket,
swung on a pole and carried on the shoulders of two men. If your neck
does not break, your feet go hopelessly to sleep. Headaches seem to
lodge somewhere in the bamboos, to afflict every victim entrapped in
it. To ride in a kago is as pleasant as riding in a washtub or a
coffin slung on a pole. In some mountain-passes stout native porters
carry you pickapack. Crossing the shallow rivers, you may sit upon a
platform borne on men's shoulders as they wade. Saddle-horses are
not to be publicly hired, but pack-horses are pleasant means of
locomotion. These animals and their leaders deserve a whole chapter
of description for themselves. Fancy a brass-bound peaked pack-saddle
rising a foot above the animal's back, with a crupper-strap
slanting down to clasp the tail. The oft-bandied slur, that in Japan
everything goes by contraries, has a varnish of truth on it when we
notice that the most gorgeous piece of Japanese saddlery is the
crupper, which, even on a pack-horse, is painted crimson and gilded
gloriously. The man who leads the horse is an animal that by long
contact and companionship with the quadruped has grown to resemble
him in disposition and ejaculation: at least, the equine and the
human seem to harmonize well together. This man is called in Japanese
"horse side." He is dressed in straw sandals and the
universally worn kimono, or blue cotton wrapper-like dress,
which is totally unfitted for work of any kind, and which makes the
slovens of Japan—a rather numerous class—always look as
if they had just got out of bed. At his waist is the usual girdle,
from which hangs the inevitable bamboo-and-brass pipe, the bowl of
which holds but a pellet of the mild fine-cut tobacco of the country.
The pipe-case is connected with a tobacco-pouch, in which are also
flint, steel and tinder. All these are suspended by a cord, fastened
to a wooden or ivory button, which is tucked up through the belt. On
his head, covering his shaven mid-scalp and right-angled top-knot, is a blue cotton rag—not
handkerchief, since such an article in Japan is always made of paper.
This head-gear is usually fastened over the head by twisting the ends
under the nose. With a rope six feet long he leads his horse, which
trusts so implicitly to its master's guidance that we suspect the
prevalence of blindness among the Japanese pack-horses arises from
sheer lack of the exercise of their eyesight. These unkempt brutes
are strangers to curry-combs and brushes, though a semi-monthly
scrubbing in hot water keeps them tolerably clean. Their shoes are a
curiosity: the hoofs are not shod with iron, but with straw sandals,
tied on thrice or oftener daily. Grass is scarce in Japan, and oats
are unknown. The nags live on beans, barley, and the stalks, leaves
and tops of succulent plants, with only an occasional wisp of hay or
grass.

In certain districts horses of one or the other sex, as the law
determines, are kept exclusively. Horses of the gentler sex in Japan
are usually led by women. During part of my journey to the place
which I am about to describe the leader of the mare I bestrode was a
maiden of some forty summers—a neat, spare, vinegar-faced
sylph, who had evidently long since left the matrimonial market, and
had devoted herself to making one horse happy for the rest of her
pilgrimage. That she was neither wife nor widow I discovered, not by
asking questions, but by the manner in which her hair was dressed.
Japanese virgins and wives have each distinct coiffures, by which,
apart from the shaven eyebrows and the teeth dyed black of the
married women, the musume or young maiden may be known. The
widow who has resolved never to marry again (always too old or ugly)
is distinguished by her smooth skull, every hair of which is shaved
off. A lady of rank may also be known by her coiffure; and many other
distinctions are thus noted.

I waited three-quarters of an hour for my horse and its leader to
appear at the post-relay at which I sat down, and was stared at
during that time by about three hundred pairs of eyes. The
populace of each village turned
out en masse to see the foreigner, and they diligently
improved their time in examining him from crown to boot-sole. Like
everything else in the rural districts of Japan, my guide was not in
a hurry, and could not understand why a foreigner should be. But
finally arriving, she bowed very low and invited me to climb up on
the saddle, and off we started for a mountain ride of eight
miles.

A Japanese pack-horse, at his best, seems always swaying between
two opinions: his affection for the bestower of his beans and that
for the repose of the stable mutually attract him. On this occasion
the little woman gently led the horse over the rough places and down
the steep paths with the ejaculation, Mite yo! Mite yo! but
when the beast stopped too long to meditate or to chew the bit, as if
vainly trying to pick its teeth, a lively jerk of the rope and a
"You old beast! come on," started the animal on its
travels. Finally, when the creature stopped to deliberate upon the
propriety of going forward at all, the vials of the wrath of the
Japanese spinster exploded, and I was tempted to believe her
affections had been blighted. But when we met any of her friends on
the road, or passed the wayside shops or farm-houses, the scolder of
horses was the lady who wished all Ohaio
("Good-morning"), or remarked that the weather was very
fine; and when joked for carrying a foreigner, replied, "Yes, it
is the first time I have had the honor."

I need not trouble the reader with many details of geography. My
trip lasted eight days, during which I passed over two hundred miles,
two-thirds of the way on foot. I made the entire circuit of the lower
half of the peninsula, but shall dwell only on my visit to Kanozan
(Deer Mountain), famous for its lovely scenery, temple and Booddhist
monastery. From the top of the mountain there are visible innumerable
valleys, nearly the whole of the Gulf of Yeddo, and the white-throned
Foosiyama, called the highest mountain in Japan and the most
beautiful in the world. We spent the night previous in Kisaradzu, the
capital of the now united provinces, and a neat little city, just
beginning to introduce foreign civilization. Its streets were lighted
with Yankee lamps and Pennsylvania petroleum. Postal boxes after the
Yankee custom were erected and in use. Gingham umbrellas were
replacing those made of oiled paper. Barbers' poles, painted
white with the spiral red band, were set up, and within the shops
Young Japan had his queue cut off and his hair dressed in foreign
style. Ignorant of the significance of the symbolic relic of the old
days, when the barber was doctor and dentist also, and made his pole
represent a bandage wound around a broken limb, the Japanese barber
has, in many cases, added a green or blue band. Not being an adept in
the use of that refractory language which Young Japan would so like
to flatten out and plane down for vernacular use, the Japanese barber
is not always happy in executing the English legend for his
sign-board. The following are specimens:

"A HAIR-DRESSING SALOON FOR
JAPANES AND FOREIGNER."

"SHOP OF HAIR."

"HAIRS CUT IN THE ENGLISH
AND FRENCH FASHION."

Passing out of Kisaradzu, and winding up to Kanozan over the
narrow bridle-path, we pass the usual terraced rice-fields watered by
descending rivulets, and the usual thatched and mud-walled cottages,
which characterize every landscape in Japan, besides long rows of
tall tsubaki (camellia) trees, forty feet high and laden with
their crimson and white splendors. Along the road are the little
wayside shrines and sacred portals of red wood which tell where the
worshipers of the Shintoo faith adore their gods and offer their
prayers without image, idol or picture. The far more numerous images
and shrines of Booddha the sage, Amida the queen of heaven, and
hundred-armed Kuannon, tell of the popular faith of the masses of
Japan in the gentle doctrines of the Indian sage. The student of
comparative religions is interested in noticing how a code of morals
founded upon atheistic humanitarianism, in its origin utterly
destitute of theology, has developed into a colossal system of
demonology, dogmatics, eschatology, myths and legends, with a
pantheon more populous than that of old Rome. Many of the images by
the wayside are headless, cloven by frost, overturned by earthquakes,
and so pitted by time as to resemble petrified smallpox patients
rather than divinities. Nature neither respects dogma nor worships
the gods made by men, and the moss and the lichens have muffled up
the idols and eaten the substance of the sacred stone. Here Booddha
wears a robe of choicest green, and there the little saxafrage waves
its white blossoms from the shoulder of Amida, rending asunder her
stone body. Even the little stone columns which contain a guiding
hand pointing out the road to Kanozan are dedicated to Great Shaka
(Booddha). Passing one of the larger temples, we meet a company of
pilgrims. Actual sight and reasoning from experience in other lands
agree in telling me that they are women, and most of them old women.
They return my salute, politely striving to conceal their wonder at
the first to-jin they have ever looked upon.

I would wager that these people, like most of the rustics in
Japan, have always believed the foreigners from Europe and America to
be certainly ruffians, and most probably beasts. Many of them,
without having heard; of Darwin or Monboddo, believe all the
"hairy foreigners" to be descendants of dogs. Their first
meeting with a foreigner sweeps away the cobwebs of prejudice, and
they are ashamed of their former ignorance. In extorting from
Japanese friends their first ideas about foreigners, I have been
forcibly reminded of some popular ideas concerning the people of
China and Japan which are still entertained at home, especially by
the queens of the kitchen and the lords of the hod.

After the fashion in Japan, I inquire of the pilgrims whence they
came and whither they are going. Leaning upon their staves and
unslinging their huge round,
conical hats, they give me to know that they have come on foot from
Muja, nearly one hundred and fifty miles distant, and that they will
finish their pilgrimage at Kominato—where the great founder of
the Nichiren sect (one of the last developments of Booddhism in
Japan) was born—twenty-seven miles beyond the point at which we
met. I inform them that I have come over seven thousand miles, and
will also visit Nichiren's birthplace. "Sayo de
gozarimos! Naru hodo?" ("Indeed, is it
possible?")

I have reached their hearts through the gates of surprise. A
foreigner visiting Nichiren's birthplace! And coming seven
thousand miles too! The old ladies become loquacious. They pour out
their questions by dozens. Do you have Booddhist temples in America?
Of course the Nichiren sect flourishes there? When I politely answer
No to both questions, a look of disappointed surprise and pity steals
over both the ruddy and the wrinkled faces. "Then he is a
heathen!" says the expression on their faces. How strange that
no Booddhist temples exist in the foreigner's country! Ah,
perhaps, then, the Shintoo religion is the religion of the
foreigner's country? "No? Naru hodo! Then what
do you believe in?"

It did not take long to answer that question. There is no country
in the world in which Christianity has been more publicly and
universally advertised. For three centuries, in every city, village
and hamlet and on every highway, the names of Christianity and its
Founder have been proclaimed on the edict-boards and in the public
law-books of the empire as belonging to a corrupt and hateful
doctrine; which should a man believe, he would be punished on earth
by fines, imprisonment, perhaps death, and in jigoku (hell) by
torments eternal. "Whosoever believeth in Christ shall be
damned—whosoever believeth not shall be saved," was the
formula taught by the priests for centuries. I pointed to the board
on which hung the edicts prohibiting Christianity, and told them I
believed in that doctrine, and that Christ was the One adored and loved by us. A volley of
naru hodos, spoken with bated breath, greeted this
announcement, and I could only understand the whispered "Why,
that is the sect whose followers will go to hell!" The old
ladies could not walk fast, and we soon parted, after many a strange
question concerning morals, customs and the details of civilization
in the land of the foreigner. Be it said, in passing, that the
present liberal and enlightened government of Japan, in spite of
priestly intolerance and the bigotry of ignorance, resisting even to
blood, has decided upon the recission of the slanderous falsehoods
against the faith of Christendom; and Japan, though an Asiatic
nation, will soon grant toleration to all creeds.

The path wound up through higher valleys, revealing bolder
scenery. Afar off, in the sheen of glorified distance, the water
slanted to the sky. The white bosoms of the square-sailed junks
heaved with breezy pulses, the mountains were thrones of stainless
blue, the floods of sunny splendor and the intense fullness of light,
for which the cloudless sky of Japan is remarkable, told the reason
for the naming of Niphon, of which "Japan" is but the
foreigner's corruption, "Great Land of the Fountain of
Light." Anon we entered the groves of mountain-pines anchored in
the rocks, and with girths upon which succeeding centuries had
clasped their zones. They seemed like Nature's senators in
council as they whispered together and murmured in the breeze that
reached us laden with music and freighted with resinous aroma.
Reaching a hamlet called Mute ("six hands"), I sit outside
an inn on one of the benches which are ever ready for the traveler,
and shaded overhead by a screen of boughs. A young girl brings me
water, the ever-ready cup of tea, and fire for the pipe which I am
supposed to smoke. A short rest, another hour's climb and walk,
and we are in the village of Kanozan, which is scarcely more than a
street of hotels. Situated on the ridge of the mountain, it rises
like an island in a sea of pines.

In imagining a Japanese hotel, good reader, please dismiss all
architectural ideas derived from the Continental or the Fifth Avenue.
Our hotels in Japan, outwardly at least, are wooden structures, two
stories high, often but one. Their roofs are usually thatched, though
the city caravansaries are tiled. They are entirely open on the front
ground floor, and about six feet from the sill or threshold
rises a platform about a foot and a half high, upon which the
proprietor may be seen seated on his heels behind a tiny railing ten
inches high, busy with his account-books. If it is winter he is
engaged in the absorbing occupation of all Japanese tradesmen at that
time of year—warming his hands over a charcoal fire in a low
brazier. The kitchen is usually just next to this front room, often
separated from the street only by a latticed partition. In evolving a
Japanese kitchen out of his or her imagination, the reader must cast
away the rising conception of Bridget's realm. Blissful, indeed,
is the thought as I enter the Japanese hotel that neither the typical
servant-girl nor the American hotel-clerk is to be found here. The
landlord comes to meet me, and, falling on his hands and knees, bows
his head to the floor. One or two of the pretty girls out of the bevy
usually seen in Japanese hotels comes to assist me and take my traps.
Welcomes, invitations and plenty of fun greet me as I sit down to
take off my shoes, as all good Japanese do, and as those filthy
foreigners don't who tramp on the clean mats with muddy boots. I
stand up unshod, and am led by the laughing girls along the smooth
corridors, across an arched bridge which spans an open space in which
is a rookery, garden, and pond stocked with goldfish, turtles and
marine plants. The room which my fair guides choose for me is at the
rear end of the house, overlooking the grand scenery for which
Kanozan is justly famous all over the empire. Ninety-nine valleys are
said to be visible from the mountain-top on which the hotel is
situated, and I suspect that multiplication by ten would scarcely be
an exaggeration. A world of blue water and pines, and the detailed
loveliness of the rolling land, form a picture which I lack power to
paint with words. The water seemed the type of repose, the earth of
motion.

Enjoying to the full that rapture of first vision which one never
feels twice, I turned and entered the room, which made up in neatness
what it lacked in luxury. Furniture in a Japanese house there is
none. Like all the others, the floor of my room was covered with soft
matting two inches thick, made into sections six feet long and three
feet wide, and bound with a black border. The dimensions of a room
may always be expressed by the number of mats. The inside of the mats
is of rice straw, the outside is of the finest and smoothest matting.
There are no chairs, stools, sofas or anything to sit down upon,
though, having long since forgotten the fact, we find a ready seat on
the floor. On one side of the room, occupying one-half of its space,
is the tokonoma, a little platform anciently used for the bed,
two feet wide and five or six inches high. In one corner is a large
vase containing four or five boughs broken from a plum tree crowded
with blossoms, and a large bunch of white, crimson and dappled
camellias, both single and double. In the centre is the sword-rack,
found in every samurai's house, yet now obsolete, since
Japan's chivalry have laid aside their two swords. On the other
half of the room, occupying the same side as the tokonoma, is a
series of peculiar shelves like those of an open Japanese cabinet,
though larger; and at the top of these is a little closet closed by
sliding doors. The other three sides of the room are of sliding
partitions six feet high, made of fine white wood, latticed in small
squares and covered with paper, through which mellow, softened light
fills the room. On the plastered wall above the latticed sliding
doors hangs a framed tablet on which are written Chinese characters,
which, having the Japanese letters at the side, tell in terse and
poetical phrase that "This room is the chamber of peaceful
meditation, into which the moonlight streams." Some of the
lattice and other work is
handsomely carved and wrought, and a paper screen along the wall
which separates this room from the next is covered with verses of
Japanese poetry. Were it cold weather, a brazier, with some live
coals in it, would be brought for us to toast our hands and feet and
to shiver over, as stoves and hard coal are not Japanese
institutions. First of all, however, at present, one of the
musumes brings me a tobacco-bon or tray, in which is
fire to light my pipe, the Japanese scarcely having a conception of a
man who does not smoke.

My description of a Japanese room will answer, in the main, for
any in Japan as it was—from the artisan's to the
emperor's. Even the palaces of the mikado in Kioto never
contained tables, chairs, bedsteads or any such inconvenient and
space-robbing thing. The tables upon which they ate, played chess or
wrote were six inches or a foot high. A Japanese of the old style
thinks the cumbrous furniture in our Western dwellings impertinent
and unnecessary. In the eye of aesthetic Japanese a room crowded with
luxurious upholstery is a specimen of barbaric pomp, delighting the
savage and unrefined eye of the hairy foreigners, but shocking to the
purged vision and the refined taste of one born in great Niphon. No
such tradesman as an upholsterer or furniture-dealer exists in Japan.
The country is a paradise for young betrothed couples who would wed
with light purses. One sees love in a cottage on a national scale
here. That terrible lion of expense, the furnishing of a house, that
stands ever in the way of so many loving pairs desirous of marriage
and a home of their own, is a bugbear not known in Japan. A chest of
drawers for clothing, a few mats, two or three quilts for a bed on
the floor, some simple kitchen utensils, and the house is furnished.
Why should we litter these neatly matted rooms, why cover with paint
and gilding virgin wood of faultless grain, or mar the sweet
simplicity and airy roominess of our (Japanese) chambers by loading
them with all kinds of unnecessary luxuries?

These reflections are broken in upon by Miss Cherry-blossom, one
of the maids, who glides in, kneels upon the floor, and sets down a
tiny round tray with a baby tea-pot and a cup the size of an egg.
Pouring out some tea, enough to half fill one of these porcelain
thimbles, she sets it in the socket of another yet tinier tray, and
bowing her head coquettishly, begs me to drink. Having long since
learned to quaff Japan's fragrant beverage guiltless of milk or
sugar, I drain the cup. Miss Cherry-blossom, sitting upright upon her
heels, folds her dress neatly under her knees, gives her loose robe a
twitch, revealing to advantage her white-powdered neck, the prized
point of beauty in a Japanese maiden, and then asks the usual
questions as to whence I came, whither I am going, and to what
country I belong. These, according to the Japanese code of etiquette,
are all polite questions; and in return, violating no dictum which
the purists of Kioto or Yeddo have laid down, I inquire her age
("Your honorable years, how many?"). The answer,
"Ju-hachi," makes known that she is eighteen years
of age. Chatting further, I learn what things there are to be seen in
the neighborhood, whether foreigners have been there before, the
distance to the next village, the history of the old temple near by,
etc. All this is told with many a laugh and a little
pantomime—she naturally committing the mistake of speaking
louder and faster to the foreigner who cannot fully understand her
dialect or allusions—when a new character appears upon the
scene.

A very jolly, matronly-looking woman, evidently the landlady,
pulls aside one of the sliding paper doors, and bowing low on her
hands and knees, smiles cavernously with her jet-black teeth, which,
like all correct and cleanly women in Japan, she dyes on alternate
days. She asks concerning dinner, and whether it is the honorable
wish of the visitor to eat Japanese food. The answer being
affirmative, both matron and maiden disappear to prepare the meal,
evidently thinking it a fine joke. No such thing as a common
dining-room exists in Japanese hotels. Caste has hitherto been too
strictly observed to allow of such an idea. Every guest eats in his
own room, sitting on his calves and heels. The preparations are
simple, though of course I speak now of every-day life.

Miss Peach-blossom appears, bearing in her hand a table four
inches high, one foot square, and handsomely lacquered red and black.
Behind her comes a young girl carrying a rice-box and plate of fish.
Most gracefully she sets it down with the apology, "I have kept
you long waiting," and the invitation, "Please take
up."

On the table are four covered bowls, two very small dishes
containing pickles and soy, and a little paper bag in which is a pair
of chopsticks. The place of each article is foreordained by
gastronomic etiquette, and rigidly observed. In the first bowl is
soup, in the second a boiled mixture consisting of leeks, mushrooms,
lotus-root and a kind of sea-weed. In a third are boiled buckwheat
cakes or dumplings, and tofu or bean-curd. In the porcelain
cup is rice. In an oblong dish, brought in during the meal, is a
broiled fish in soy. Lifting off the covers and adjusting my
chopsticks deftly, I begin. The bowl of rice is first attacked, and
quickly finished. The attendant damsel proffers her lacquered waiter,
and uncovering the steaming tub of rice paddles out another cupful.
It is etiquette to dispose of unlimited cups of rice and soup, but a
deadly breach of good manners to ask to have the other two bowls
replenished. Of course at the hotels whatever the larder affords can
be ordered. Boiled eggs, cracked and peeled before you by the
tapering fingers of the damsels, are considered choice articles of
food. Raw fish, thinly sliced and eaten with radish, sauce, ginger
sprouts, etc., is highly enjoyed by the Japanese, who are surprised
to find the dish disliked by their foreign guests. A member of one of
the embassies sent to Europe confessed that amid the luxuries of
continental tables, he longed for the raw fish and grated radish of
his native land. Some articles of our own diet, especially cheese and
butter, are as heartily detested by the Japanese as their raw fish is
by us. The popular idea at home, that the Japanese live chiefly on
mice and crawfish, and that the foreigners are in chronic danger of
starvation, is matched by that of some Japanese, who, finding that
the "hairy foreigners" do not eat the food of human
beings—i.e. Japanese—wonder what they do eat. A
member of the present embassy in Europe, when first leaving his
native land, was thus addressed by his anxious mother: "Now,
Yazirobe, you are going to those strange countries, where I am afraid
you will get very little to eat: do take some rice with you." I
confess that on first landing in Japan I could not relish Japanese
diet and cookery. Barring eggs and rice, everything tasted like
starch or sawdust. The flavors seemed raw and earthy, or suggested
dishcloths not too well scalded. I suspect that a good deal of
Philadelphia and Caucasian pride lined the alimentary canal of the
writer. Now, after a ten-mile tramp, a Japanese meal tastes very much
as it does to one native and to the diet born.

Besides the young damsel who presides, there is another, less
neatly dressed. Her apron is suggestive of the kitchen, and
altogether she seems a Cinderella by the fireplace. This damsel is
evidently a supe or scullion. She is not so self-possessed as her
superior companion, and while observing the foreigner with a mild
stare, unskillfully concealing her mirth, she finally explodes when
he makes a faux pas with the chopsticks and drops a bit of
fish on the clean matting. Thereupon she is dispatched to the kitchen
for a floor-cloth, and severely lectured for laughing aloud, and is
told to stay among the pots and pans till she learns better
manners.

Dinner over, a siesta on the soft mats is next in order. These
mats seem made for sleep and indolence. No booted foot ever defiles
them. Every one leaves his clogs on the ground outside, and glides
about in his mitten-like socks, which have each a special compartment
for the great toe. My waiting
damsel having gone out, and there being no such things as bells, I do
as the natives and clap my hands. A far-off answer of
Hei—i—i is returned, and soon the shuffling of
feet is heard again. The housewife appears with the usual low bow,
and, smiling so as to again display what resembles a mouthful of
coal, she listens to the request for a pillow. Opening the little
closet before spoken of, she produces the desired article. It is not
a ticking bag of baked feathers enclosed in a dainty, spotless case
of white linen, but a little upright piece of wood, six inches high
and long, and one wide, rounded at the bottom like the rockers of a
cradle. On the top, lying in a groove, is a tiny rounded bag of
calico filled with rice-chaff, about the size of a sausage. The
pillow-case is a piece of white paper wrapped around the top, and
renewed in good hotels daily for each guest. One can rest about four
or six inches of the side of his os occipitis on a Japanese
pillow, and if he wishes may rock himself to sleep, though the words
suggest more than the facts warrant. By sleeping on civilized
feathers one gets out of training, and the Japanese pillows feel very
hard and very much in one place. The dreams which one has on these
pillows are characteristic. In my first some imps were boring
gimlet-holes in the side of my skull, until they had honeycombed it
and removed so much brain that I felt too light-headed to preserve my
equilibrium. On the present occasion, after falling asleep, I thought
that the pillow on which I lay pressed its shape into my head, and
the skull, to be repaired, was being trepanned. My head actually
tumbling off the pillow was the cause of the fancied operation being
suddenly arrested. A short experience in traveling among the Japanese
has satisfied me that they are one of the most polite, good-natured
and happy nations in the world. By introducing foreign civilization
into their beautiful land they may become richer: they need not
expect to be happier.